21st Century Schizoid Boy

[The U.S. Department of Defense has] individuals stationed in more than 146 countries dedicated to defending the United States and its interests around the world…

In FY [(Fiscal Year)] 2008, the Defense Department’s Total Force included over 2.9 million men and women on active duty, civilians, and Reserve and Nation Guard, as well as hundreds of thousands of contract support employees…

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has identified 27 government-wide areas as “high risk” for fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement, or a need for broad-based transformations to address major economy, efficiency, or effectiveness challenges. DoD is exclusively responsible for nine areas…

Cumulative number of Iraqi Security Forces (ISFs) trained: 558,279…

The Department [has] $1.7 trillion in assets. These assets represent amounts that the Department owns and manages, $750 billion in equipment, property, etc., $400 billion in U.S. treasuries, $460 billion in funds at the U.S. Treasury…

The Department’s liabilities total over $2.1 trillion dollars, $1.9 trillion of which is for retired military and other employment benefits, 80% are unfunded liabilities.

Fiscal Year 2008 Citizens’ Report Summary of Performance and Financial Results, U.S. Department of Defense, January 15, 2009, http://comptroller.defense.gov/docs/citizensreport.pdf.

Military Personnel counts by country: http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/report/2007/hst0712.pdf.

The worldwide real property portfolio managed by the Department of Defense encompasses a footprint that includes all 50 states, 7 U.S. territories, and 38 foreign countries of which the majority of the foreign sites are located in Germany (235 sites), Japan (123 sites) and South Korea (87 sites).

This report includes… If the site is located in a foreign country, it must be larger than 10 acres OR have a PRV (Plant Replacement Value) greater than $10 million.

Total Base Overseas = 716
Total Buildings and Structures Overseas = 102,783

U.S. Department of Defense, Base Structure Report, Fiscal Year 2009 Baseline, http://www.defense.gov/pubs/pdfs/2009Baseline.pdf.

Historical Estimates of World Population: http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/worldhis.html.

The following graph is of Chinese population from year 0 to 2050 (2010 to 2050 based on U.N. projections). From 1650 to 1990, without much Capitalism (if any), China had similarly exponential growth:

http://www.china-profile.com/data/fig_pop_0-2050_large.htm

Notice the projected population declines in China around 2040 in the U.N.’s medium and low varients. This is in line with U.N. projections of the same sort for the world, caused mostly by lower-than-replacement fertility rates as standard of living increases.

In relation to China not being Capitalist:

Since the late 1940s, the state regarded long-distance trade as a speculative, capitalist activity and branded those involved as criminals. In the early 1960s, such traders were labeled as “bad elements.” Some lost their jobs or were sent to labor camps while others were put on neighborhood watch lists to be supervised closely. Even in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the sight of policemen chasing and confiscating a rural peddler’s goods was common.7 One Chinese entrepreneur compared his early business ventures to an untrained acrobat walking a tightrope: “I was excited about the huge market opportunities while scared to death of returning to a prison cell. I lived a life of constant sweat, sleepless nights, and thumping heartbeats.”8 Throughout the early 1980s, farmers in north Jiangsu packed their bikes with chickens, ducks, and other fowl, crossed the Yangzi River, and shipped their products by rail to urban centers in the Yangzi basin. “A million roosters cross the mighty Yangzi” was the expression of the day.9

How China Won and Russia Lost, Policy Review, Paul R. Gregory and Kate Zhou, Hoover Institution, Standford University, February 2010, http://www.hoover.org/publications/policyreview/72997307.html.

Current World Population Clock: http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/popclockworld.html

In summary:

• They can’t explain the depression of 1920-1921, which had a worst first year than the Great Depression, government cut spending, no stimulus, yet the economy bounced back in a year.
• After World War II, they predicted another depression and high unemployment because of the 10 million soldiers coming back. The exact opposite happened, and the years after WWII were not only okay, but the most productive in the history of the U.S. as government cut spending.
• They said stagflation was literally impossible. It happened in the 1970s.
• They said the Soviet Union would eventually outgrow the U.S., and continued saying it even until 1989, a year before its complete economic collapse.

In 1969, the Psychiatrist Elizabeth Kübler-Ross wrote one of the most influential books in the history of psychology, On Death and Dying. It exposed the heartless treatment of terminally-ill patients prevalent at the time. On the positive side, it altered the care and treatment of dying people. On the negative side, it postulated the now-infamous five stages of dying—Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance (DABDA), so annealed in culture that most people can recite them by heart. The stages allegedly represent what a dying person might experience upon learning he or she had a terminal illness. “Might” is the operative word, because Kübler-Ross repeatedly stipulated that a dying person might not go through all five stages, nor would they necessarily go through them in sequence. It would be reasonable to ask: if these conditions are this arbitrary, can they truly be called stages?…

As professional grief recovery specialists, we contend that the theory of the stages of grief has done more harm than good to grieving people. Having co-authored three books on the impact of death, divorce, and other losses, and having worked directly with over 100,000 grieving people during the past 30 years, our reasons for disputing the stages of grief theory are predicated on the horror stories we’ve heard from thousands of grieving people who’ve told us how they’d been harmed by them…

On February 21, 2007, The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) published the results of the Yale Bereavement Study (YBS): An Empirical Examination of the Stage Theory of Grief…

The YBS begins: “The notion that a natural psychological response to loss involves an orderly progression through distinct stages of bereavement has been widely accepted by clinicians and the general public.” It concludes: “Identification of the normal stages of grief following a death from natural causes enhances understanding of how the average person cognitively and emotionally processes the loss of a family member.” We are troubled by the assumption that stages of grief are normal and distinct and progress in a specific order. We also wonder, when does “wide acceptance” equal scientific fact?

Contrast the alleged wide acceptance of an “orderly progression of stages” with this from the inside cover of Meaning Reconstruction & the Experience of Loss, edited by Robert A. Neimeyer: “Debunking the notion that an invariant sequence of stages of grief occurs among all who experience the death of a loved one, this groundbreaking volume clearly demonstrates that highly individual processes of meaning making are at the heart of grief dynamics.” Published by the American Psychological Association in 2001, Neimeyer’s book presents 26 academicians’ and clinicians’ non-stage methods for helping grieving people…

As much effort as we’ve put in to refuting the stages, Kübler-Ross herself rebuts them better than we can in the opening paragraph of On Grief and Grieving: “The stages have evolved since their introduction, and they have been very misunderstood over the past three decades. They were never meant to help tuck messy emotions into neat packages. They are responses to loss that many people have, but there is not a typical response to loss, as there is no typical loss. Our grief is as individual as our lives. Not everyone goes through all of them or goes in a prescribed order.”

If there are no typical responses to loss and no typical losses, and not everyone goes through them or in order, how can there possibly be stages that universally represent people’s reactions to loss? The fact is, no study has ever established that stages of grief actually exist, and what are defined as such can’t be called stages. Grief is the normal and natural emotional response to loss. Stage theories put grieving people in conflict with their emotional reactions to losses that affect them. No matter how much people want to create simple, iron clad guidelines for the human emotions of grief, there are no stages of grief that fit every person or relationship.

The Myth of the Stages of Dying, Death and Grief, Russell Friedman & John W. James, Skeptic Magazine, 2008, http://www.grief.net/Articles/Myth%20of%20Stages.pdf.

An article by Lew Rockwell of the Mises Institute in 2004 on the way mainstream Republicans lull libertarian and independent minded peoples from positive ideas of freedom and liberty into negative ideas of anti-leftist fascism (where fascism is defined as basically a militaristic, nationalistic, idolatrous corporatism). A great example is the Tea Party “Movement,” first started by Ron Paul’s 2008 Presidential Campaign, and subsequently hijacked, co-opted, and distorted by the mainstream Republican neo-Fascists.

The most significant socio-political shift in our time has gone almost completely unremarked, and even unnoticed. It is the dramatic shift of the red-state bourgeoisie from leave-us-alone libertarianism, manifested in the Congressional elections of 1994, to almost totalitarian statist nationalism. Whereas the conservative middle class once cheered the circumscribing of the federal government, it now celebrates power and adores the central state, particularly its military wing.

This huge shift has not been noticed among mainstream punditry, and hence there have been few attempts to explain it – much less have libertarians thought much about what it implies. My own take is this: the Republican takeover of the presidency combined with an unrelenting state of war, has supplied all the levers necessary to convert a burgeoning libertarian movement into a statist one.

Rothbard said, two errors rear their head in most every revolution. First, the reformers do not move fast enough; instead they often experience a crisis of faith and become overwhelmed by demands that they govern “responsibly” rather than tear down the established order. Second, the reformers leave too much in place that can be used by their successors to rebuild the state they worked so hard to dismantle. This permits gains to be reversed as soon as another party takes control…

In the last years of the 1990s, the GOP-voting middle class refocused its anger away from government and leviathan and toward the person of Bill Clinton. It was said that he represented some kind of unique moral evil despoiling the White House. That ridiculous Monica scandal culminated in a pathetic and pretentious campaign to impeach Clinton. Impeaching presidents is a great idea, but impeaching them for fibbing about personal peccadilloes is probably the least justifiable ground. It’s almost as if that entire campaign was designed to discredit the great institution of impeachment.

In any case, this event crystallized the partisanship of the bourgeoisie, driving home the message that the real problem was Clinton and not government; the immorality of the chief executive, not his power; the libertinism of the left-liberals and not their views toward government. The much heralded “leave us alone” coalition had been thoroughly transformed in a pure anti-Clinton movement. The right in this country began to define itself not as pro-freedom, as it had in 1994, but simply as anti-leftist, as it does today.

There are many good reasons to be anti-leftist, but let us revisit what Mises said in 1956 concerning the anti-socialists of his day. He pointed out that many of these people had a purely negative agenda, to crush the leftists and their bohemian ways and their intellectual pretension. He warned that this is not a program for freedom. It was a program of hatred that can only degenerate into statism:

The moral corruption, the licentiousness and the intellectual sterility of a class of lewd would-be authors and artists is the ransom mankind must pay lest the creative pioneers be prevented from accomplishing their work. Freedom must be granted to all, even to base people, lest the few who can use it for the benefit of mankind be hindered. The license which the shabby characters of the quartier Latin enjoyed was one of the conditions that made possible the ascendance of a few great writers, painters and sculptors. The first thing a genius needs is to breathe free air.

He goes on to urge that anti-leftists work to educate themselves about economics, so that they can have a positive agenda to displace their purely negative one. A positive agenda of liberty is the only way we might have been spared the blizzard of government controls that were fastened on this country after Bush used the events of 9-11 to increase central planning, invade Afghanistan and Iraq, and otherwise bring a form of statism to America that makes Clinton look laissez-faire by comparison. The Bush administration has not only faced no resistance from the bourgeoisie, it has received cheers. And they are not only cheering Bush’s reelection; they have embraced tyrannical control of society as a means toward accomplishing their anti-leftist ends.

After September 11, even those whose ostensible purpose in life is to advocate less government changed their minds. Even after it was clear that 9-11 would be used as the biggest pretense for the expansion of government since the stock market crash of 1929, the Cato Institute said that libertarianism had to change its entire focus: “Libertarians usually enter public debates to call for restrictions on government activity. In the wake of September 11, we have all been reminded of the real purpose of government: to protect our life, liberty, and property from violence. This would be a good time for the federal government to do its job with vigor and determination.”

The vigor and determination of the Bush administration has brought about a profound cultural change, so that the very people who once proclaimed hatred of government now advocate its use against dissidents of all sorts, especially against those who would dare call for curbs in the totalitarian bureaucracy of the military, or suggest that Bush is something less than infallible in his foreign-policy decisions. The lesson here is that it is always a mistake to advocate government action, for there is no way you can fully anticipate how government will be used. Nor can you ever count on a slice of the population to be moral in its advocacy of the uses of the police power.

If you follow hate-filled sites such as Free Republic… The militarism and nationalism dwarfs anything I saw at any point during the Cold War. It celebrates the shedding of blood, and exhibits a maniacal love of the state.

Along with this goes a kind of worship of the presidency, and a celebration of all things public sector, including egregious law like the Patriot Act, egregious bureaucracies like the Department of Homeland Security, and egregious centrally imposed regimentation like the No Child Left Behind Act. It longs for the state to throw its weight behind institutions like the two-parent heterosexual family, the Christian charity, the homogeneous community of native-born patriots.

Paul Craig Roberts is right: “In the ranks of the new conservatives, however, I see and experience much hate. It comes to me in violently worded, ignorant and irrational emails from self-professed conservatives who literally worship George Bush. Even Christians have fallen into idolatry. There appears to be a large number of Americans who are prepared to kill anyone for George Bush.” Again: “Like Brownshirts, the new conservatives take personally any criticism of their leader and his policies. To be a critic is to be an enemy.”

In short, what we have alive in the US is an updated and Americanized fascism. Why fascist? Because it is not leftist in the sense of egalitarian or redistributionist. It has no real beef with business. It doesn’t sympathize with the downtrodden, labor, or the poor. It is for all the core institutions of bourgeois life in America: family, faith, and flag. But it sees the state as the central organizing principle of society, views public institutions as the most essential means by which all these institutions are protected and advanced, and adores the head of state as a godlike figure who knows better than anyone else what the country and world’s needs, and has a special connection to the Creator that permits him to discern the best means to bring it about.

The American right today has managed to be solidly anti-leftist while adopting an ideology – even without knowing it or being entirely conscious of the change – that is also frighteningly anti-liberty. This reality turns out to be very difficult for libertarians to understand or accept. For a long time, we’ve tended to see the primary threat to liberty as coming from the left, from the socialists who sought to control the economy from the center. But we must also remember that the sweep of history shows that there are two main dangers to liberty, one that comes from the left and the other that comes from the right. Europe and Latin America have long faced the latter threat, but its reality is only now hitting us fully.

What is the most pressing and urgent threat to freedom that we face in our time? It is not from the left. If anything, the left has been solid on civil liberties and has been crucial in drawing attention to the lies and abuses of the Bush administration. No, today, the clear and present danger to freedom comes from the right side of the ideological spectrum, those people who are pleased to preserve most of free enterprise but favor top-down management of society, culture, family, and school, and seek to use a messianic and belligerent nationalism to impose their vision of politics on the world.

There is no proxy for liberty, no cause that serves as a viable substitute, and no movement by any name whose success can yield freedom in our time other than the movement of freedom itself. We need to embrace liberty and liberty only, and not be fooled by groups or parties or movements that only desire a temporary liberty to advance their pet interests.

The Reality of Red-State Fascism, Llewellyn Rockwell, December 31, 2004, http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/red-state-fascism.html.

An example was James Adkisson who was sentenced to life in prison for killing 2 and injuring 7 at a Knoxville, Tennessee Unitarian Universalist Church on July 27, 2008. Here is a letter about his pre-meditated killings: http://web.knoxnews.com/pdf/021009church-manifesto.pdf.

Another example: a speech by Rush Limbaugh: http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_021109/content/01125107.guest.html.

The desire for power frequently begets petty hypocrisy, which is among the world’s most tragically abundant resources. Just as many of yesterday’s leftist dissidents now treat political nonconformity as a species of treason, many of those who denounce the current president as a domestic enemy would have considered such rhetoric a Gitmo-worthy offense just a few years ago.

Many of yesterday’s most strident “peace” activists are either deferentially silent, or dutifully supportive, as their president slays thousands of innocent foreigners via remote control. Likewise, many (by no means all) of those who condemn Obama’s orgy of federal spending are recent converts to the church of public austerity, having endured eight years under the reign of the equally profligate Bush without audible complaint.

The problem here, of course, is that both sides in this manufactured conflict are manipulated by power-obsessed people into defining the enemy in “horizontal” rather than “vertical” terms; that is, the real threat consists of “those people” over there, rather than those who presume to exercise power over all of us. Rather than seeking an end to the Leviathan State, each side seeks to control its coercive appendages while protecting its own interests in the cynical and entirely misplaced confidence that the powers they surrender to the state today won’t be pitilessly deployed against them tomorrow.

http://freedominourtime.blogspot.com/2010/02/whos-afraid-of-interposition.html

Arguing politics in public is like having sex in public: Some just can’t do it comfortably. Even though both are very natural.

An unknown Russian long ago devised the now-familiar joke in which a bright college student, drowning in impenetrable ideological cant, asks the smug Party hack posing as a professor to explain, in easily understood terms, the material difference between capitalism and socialism.

“Oh, that’s easy to explain,” replied the professor, his face twisted into a triumphant smirk. “Capitalism is based on the exploitation of man by man; socialism works exactly in the reverse!”

Limbaugh-Leninism, William Norman Grigg, February 16, 2009, http://www.lewrockwell.com/grigg/grigg-w79.html.

Great website — Crowdsource project funding: http://www.kickstarter.com/

Thomas More was born in 1477. He published Utopia in Latin in 1516. He was beheaded in 1535 by the government of England for denying the supremacy of the King as head of the Church.

You see, our friend Raphael — for that’s his name, Raphael Nonsenso — is quite a scholar…

We did not ask him if he had seen any monsters, for monsters have ceased to be news. There is never any shortage of horrible creatures who prey on human beings, snatch away their food, or devour whole populations; but examples of wise social planning are not so easy to find…

My present plan is merely to repeat what he said about the laws and customs of Utopia.

Utopia, Thomas More, Translated to English by Turner, http://www.amazon.com/Utopia-Penguin-Classics-Thomas-More/dp/0140449108.